Hospitals and other clinical facilities face the task of managing the effective delivery of health services and accounting for supplies in a healthcare environment. Certain commercially available supply management information systems exist which may permit hospital administrators to select, purchase and monitor supplies and material for various operations. However, those platforms suffer from disadvantages of various types. Cost recovery on a patient basis, for instance to attempt to assign costs of supplies consumed during procedures performed for the patient can be difficult. Billing departments may be left with no alternative other than simply averaging costs of supplies over all patients, or assigning that clinical consumption to other cost centers within the organization. This may lead to cost distortions for insurance payments and other purposes.
Furthermore, in the commercially available supply management information systems, clinical supply consumption may be tracked or monitored, but only at a department or facility-wide level. For instance, a director of a surgical unit may be able to review how many scalpels or stents his or her unit consumed last month. However, these systems only permit the administrator to view and manage clinical supplies only at the aggregate level, without associating supply consumption to specific patients. As such, clinical administrators are not able to leverage the use of supply items for a particular patient in inventory records.
These commercially available supply management information systems also lack the ability to associate supply items with treatment of a patient. For example, they do not provide the ability to associate supply items with tasks or orders to be performed or that have been performed for a patient.